Forum:Automatic Categories instead of Manual Indexes
If we can get it so that every NPC here is well categoried... by CR, by creature type, by profession... we could do away with the manually created pages and just use the automatic ones. Creating new pages can be done by typing the name of the page you want into the searchbar to the left, I recently discovered, so creating the red-link first isn't actually a requirement. What do you guys think? Good idea? Or do the manual lists have inherant advantages somehow? Fieari 17:10, 3 February 2006 (UTC) :The major drawback that I see to this plan is that of naming the articles. In the category listings by CR, having the CR in the title is redundant, you'd rather have it sort alphabetically by profession or type. But in the category listings for creature type, having CR in the title is good, and you may want to sort by it. I proposed a change like this on the Talk:D20 NPCs by Challenge Rating page a while back. I'm in favor of a method that makes the page titles different depending on how you are categorizing them. It means more work to maintain, but it would be more useful to me in using the NPCs here. Of course, there's no reason why both can't exist: you can have all the categories you want, and those who care can still maintain the index files manually. --MidnightLightning 22:02, 3 February 2006 (UTC) ::This is most likely not relevant any more but If your going to use categories to index multiple things than can't you just set up a series or redirects point to the article and have each redirect categorized in such a way that it the article title is formated correctly for each list 155.42.91.129 05:13, 28 August 2007 (UTC) Actually, that is a very good point; I've been doing more research into this issue recently, and the above poster's method is what is used at Wikipedia for categorizing items under different names. I at first thought this would be way more work, but it's pretty comparable to what we need to do currently. I designed the Template:RaceLink and Template:CRlink to pretty-ify the lists, but unfortunately templates can't make this process any easier. I propose the following naming convention for Redirects back to the article page, for the best clarity in Category listings: *Race/Type Categories: Name/description (Slash-delimited list of classes), template(s), CR *Class Categories: Race (slash-delimited list of classes), template(s), CR, Name/description *Rulebooks Categories: Race (slash-delimited list of classes), template(s), CR, Name/description *Challenge Rating Categories: Race (slash-delimited list of classes), template(s), Name/description Via this rubric, the 'Class' and 'Rulebook' categories are identical, so three Redirect pages would be made to point to the original article. As much as I like the coloring possible with the Link templates I made, having the Categories be the actual index pages I think would be best. Especially since I found that the Wikia install gives access to the CategoryTree extension, which can display the categories and sub-categories rather nicely. I updated the D20 NPCs by Primary Character Class page to use it in the "Core PC Classes" listing, which I think works out well. One downside of the Category indexes is that MediaWiki doesn't count Categorization as a 'link' in terms of the listing, so that tool becomes less useful for administrative use, but that's a minor inconvenience. Does anyone have an opinion on the Category indexes or the order of the suggested Redirect pages? --MidnightLightning 20:21, 30 March 2009 (UTC)